Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday November 17, 2010 @01:09PM
from the security-theater dept.

3-year-old Mandy Simon started crying when her teddy bear had to go through the X-ray machine at airport security in Chattanooga, Tenn. She was so upset that she refused to go calmly through the metal detector, setting it off twice. Agents then informed her parents that she "must be hand-searched." The subsequent TSA employee pat down of the screaming child was captured by her father, who happens to be a reporter, on his cell phone. The video have left some questioning why better procedures for children aren't in place. I, for one, feel much safer knowing the TSA is protecting us from impressionable minds warped by too much Dora the Explorer.

What would happen if there was a suicide bomber that was caught with a child, and the child was the one with the bomb... Would we willingly subject our children to being searched after an incident like this?

Its happened in places like Palestine. When people get desperate enough, or when their belief system gets twisted enough, people will try it. Its just that such a attack may happen once every decade in the west, and there is a point where it simply isn't worth the loss of privacy and freedom for hundreds of millions of people to save a few lives, maybe, one time in the next 10 years.

A terrorists in Saudi Arabia already stuffed explosives up his butt. None of our current security measures can catch that, and obviously it is what someone willing to kill themselves to blow up a plane will do if all others ways of concealing weapons are eliminated.

If we don't do something to cover that scenario, all our other security is a waste of time. So, what are you willing to be subjected to by the TSA to prevent the next colon bomber?

Then the GOP would not have a way to scare people into voting against their own interests.

Remember, patriotism is abandoning our liberties and principles to fight terrorism in order to preserve our... uh... profit margins?

Do you live in some alternate universe where John McCain was voted president? In my time line, we have a Democrat named Barack Obama who has been president for nearly 2 years now. We also have massive Democrat majorities in Congress. Not only are things as bad in this area, they have actually gotten significantly worse.

Well, considering that the TSA is doing NOTHING at all to protect the US from real terrorists, I don't think this is worth it.

In 1995, their was a terrorist attack on the Tokyo Metro. The technique used by them would work wonders on an airplane and the TSA has taken ZERO steps to prevent anyone from using it at US airports.

In 2001 there was a mail terrorist attack using antrhax. In a controlled envrionment with recylced air, such an attack could infest literally every person on the airplane, killing them about 4 days later. If a faster acting disease was used, the plane would crash, for that extra dramatic boom. Again, the TSA has taken ZERO steps to prevent anyone from doing this.

As of 2006 (don't know about now), the TSA had taken ZERO steps to preven Surface to Air missiles used against a commercial airlines.

So NO, I don't think a terrorist would be stupid enough to do anything that the TSA would catch. The reason the 9/11 attacks worked so well was mainly because no one had ever tried it before. As soon as the U93 became aware of what was going on, they prevented the terrorists from using the 4th plane.

The TSA has not caught a SINGLE real terrorist at the gate, ever. Instead they are engaging in illegal, unwarranted (in both senses of the word), unreasonable searches of US citizens. These searches would have stopped terrorist attacks that in the past failed. They quite clearly would NOT have stopped any of the most logical, fairly cheap potential terrorist attacks.

Their searchs are simple sexual harrasments of legal citizens, they do nothing to make us safer.

But the extensive and invasive nature of the searchs do reassure fools that trust the government with their safety, instead of questioning authority.

Great post, gurps_npc; yes, terrorism is a threat. So are drunk and distracted (cellphone using) drivers, but we put our lives at risk every day for the sake of convenience and saving time. I think people have lost all perspective.

When they fortified the doors the cockpits, IMO, the problem was adequately solved.

While I strongly disagree with the current security theater here in the USA, I'd like to interject that the TSA *workers* are simply doing their job, legally. Granted some (many) seem to be power-enthralled dicks, but I digress. Perhaps it's a work-environment, pay-scale, education-level or HR issue.:-)

In any case... The people we all should be and remain angry at are our elected representatives and, by deduction, us for electing them. They made the rules, we keep them in office.

Being asked to do something illegal in your job, like molest a child, doesn't grant you immunity from prosecution. Being asked to do something thoroughly immoral in your job, like intimidate people until they're more terrified of the security line than the flight, doesn't grant you immunity from social persecution. Needing to feed your family doesn't mean society will forgive you any action - consider whores, muggers, fraudsters, extortionists, and drug dealers.

The people we all should be and remain angry at are every single person involved in the entire farce, including the lowlife scum who didn't hand in their notice the second they were trained in the "right" way to molest a child.

Or better yet, refuse to do it, and see how a jury feels about wrongful dismissal for refusing to rub a child's genitals.

So what you're saying is that if there's a 0.00001% chance that somebody who looks like a nun is a terrorist, and a 0.01% chance that somebody who looks like a young Arab male is a terrorist, we should search every young Arab male and miss the terrorist nuns? Oh, and there's also the not-insignificant problem that any terrorist who notices this sort of profiling will simply recruit a lighter-skinned female terrorist and dress her up like a nun.

What I think you're actually saying here is "Go ahead and violate other people's rights, just don't mess the rights of people like me." They came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_hijackings [wikipedia.org] lists 171 hijackings. I omitted 2 of them where I couldn't figure out whether the hijacker was likely Muslim or not (a Croatian incident and a Bosnian one); of the remaining 169 incidents, 126 of them were by probable non-Muslims.

To put that in a percentage, about 75% of hijackings are by non-Muslims. The vast majority are by males--I think that only one was by a lone female, though some of the group hijackings may have included women (I wasn't paying attention).

Cuba is by far the dominant source of hijackings; 105 of the hijackers were Cubans.

No no no. There is profiling from a race standpoint - that won't work. There is also profiling from a "watch how a person acts and understand that they may be doing something wrong" standpoint. The second works very well. There's an article about the Israeli system that describes this in detail - I can't find it right now. It is a very effective system. Unfortunately, you have to have train people to be able to profile correctly. This, of course, would be too expensive.

Here's the issue: racial profiling doesn't work. Why? Because the terrorists will just send people through the checkpoints until they find someone who doesn't fit the profile. And then you can't stop them.

It's already well known that Muslim men attract more scrutiny than 4 year old white females, for instance. And yet terrorists don't seem to have been able to just draft a bunch of 4 year old white females to hijack planes. Why do you think that is, in your world view?

I mean hell, why haven't terrorists just recruited a bunch of American pilots to become terrorists? They have a lot less screening, and anyway they are flying the plane so they don't need to smuggle anything onboard, they can just do it 9/11 style.

Your argument just doesn't make sense. Muslim terrorists are going to work with what they have, and that's largely Muslim males.

Pat-downs were invasive even before, and now they've turned them into non-consensual erotic massages.

Perhaps people should start tipping their TSA agents after the pat-down, perhaps with a "here's $10 dollars, that was nice, but slower next time - like you mean it".

I'd easily give $100 dollars to the first person who clearly, loudly, publicly asks their TSA pat-down agent, "how much for the happy ending" and gets audio/video. Or fakes a convulsion and blackout while getting scanned - that would put a spike in the "opt-outs" for the day.

Perhaps someone can organize a non-profit to reward people who embrace civil-disobedience.

I think the next time I'm (fucking) forced to fly (for work), I'll do something similar: I'll insist that I must be frisked by nobody other than a member of the opposite sex (assuming there is one) due to past traumatic experiences of abuse.

Even better, I'll get a note from a psychologist friend of mine who hates this kind of shit saying that anything otherwise might result in a psychological regression.

NPR interviewed him recently about the pat-downs. His comment about the controversy started with a statement to the effect of, "Reasonable people can disagree." He then went on to talk about the balance of security and privacy and security and safety. It was very noticeable that he did not say they would listen to disagreements. His statement, in summary, was "Disagree all you want, but we will decide what the line is."

Honestly I hope that happens. I really, truly hope that full cavity searches will be required to fly.

It's my last hope that the people in this country will have any sense and stand up to this kind of asinine "security."

If the American people accept cavity searches every time they fly, and they just shrug and say "Well, what are you going to do?" Well, then this country has lost everything that made it special.

This will happen as long as people let it happen. By shrugged their shoulders and going along with it, they're letting the government and the TSA know that we will give them absolute free reign in this. It doesn't matter how many angry articles there are decrying the new procedures -- if people continue to fly, then the procedures will stay. And eventually they'll get worse. Again.

At the risk of people making fun of me for watching Jackass. They had a skit where they put a hotwheels car in a condom and shoved it up one guy's ass, then he went and got Xrays done because he had an "unknown pain" and wanted to get checked out. The absolute best part was the doctor's reaction when he saw the plates.

When the full body scanners came out someone commented that sewing words into shirts using metallic thread would be a good protest because they will wind up saving the images; sew in a quote of the 4th amendment or "You enjoy this don't you? Pervert".

Combine the two and I'm sure we can find enough people who would be willing to internalize something that would show up on an Xray/Sonogram. Creep out and disturb enough TSA employees and even they might start complaining.

Your American odds of dying in an airplane bombing (either on-board or in a skyscraper), are 1 in 500,000. That is about the same as your risk of drowning in a tsunami. And of course if you move to the mountains or don't fly, the odds drop to near-zero.

I think I'd rather take that infinitesimal risk, rather than take the 1-to-1 risk that some TSA officer will be playing with my penis, touching my wife's boobies, and/or fondling my kid's pussy. (Sorry for the frank language but I believe in speaking the brutal truth.)

I also think the US Transportation Secretary can go eat a bullet."This is okay," he says.No. No it is not.

Try more like 1 in TEN MILLION, the 1 in 500,000 statistic you quote comes from a misquoted infographic, which points out 1 in five hundred thousand is the odds of being struck by lightning in the continental united states. Somehow people are repeating 1 in 500k? Refer to: http://boingboing.net/2009/12/30/odds-of-being-a-terr.html [boingboing.net] It's a eye-opener.

Internationally it's even less likely, consider international airlines like Qantas who have never had a airborne single fatality let alone a terror attack.

No. Risk is based upon ACTUAL events of previous deaths, not random guessing or conjecture. Prior to 9/11 the U.S. risk of death by terrorist was 1 in 90 million. After 9/11 and the deaths of ~3000 people, it was revised to 1 in 500,000... same as your risk of drowning in a tsunami.

And LESS risky then odds of getting killed by a meteorite (1 in 200,000) or in a car (1 in 100).I'm not afraid of getting hit on the noggin, and neither am I afraid of the terrorist bogeyman.- (But I am afraid of death in a car... that is a logical thing to fear.)

"If you are really afraid of terrorism, don't travel by airplane, travel by bus. You ever been to a bus station? People walking around all dirty, in rags. A terrorist goes to a bus station and sees this and thinks, 'damn, someone already did up this joint'"

And what do you suppose happens when the people we put in charge of public safety say "terrorism is extremely rare" to explain why they did nothing to stop an attack just like the ones that already happened.

Well, if they were working on the problem the right way, they could then go on to explain how they are tackling the problem at its source by trying to improve freedom, education and living conditions around the world in a considerate, thoughtful manner so that people don't feel miserable and angry enough to want to blow other people up in the first place.

Unless we make TSA Security a 6 figure career we are not going to have good decisions and professionalism out of these people. They are mostly high-school graduates with a few weeks of training. The kind of people we can trust not to pat down every hot chick, or hold up every rude businessman, or occasionally do something moronic like this story reports, simply do not work in this sort of pay. Either we need actual doctors and nurses assigned to the pat downs, or we need to give up this little bit of safety for the sake of privacy.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has stated on multiple occasions that illegal aliens come to the US to have babies which they then raise to be terrorists, or use as human bombs that will pass security checks simply because the baby has a US papers, even though the parents are from terrorist countries, for instance, to choose a random country that is so dangerous that US citizens are prevented travel, Cuba. Recall that n the later part of 1962 Cuba tried to nuke the US out of existence. While we might suspect a Cuban adult, and do a virtual strip search, who would suspect that a Cuban baby was filled with plastique. Clearly, we must search babies, because, as was said in congress, if given a choice people would chose a thoroughly screened plane than an completely unscreened plane.

And if we think this anchor baby threat is to be taken lightly, realize that we have at least on anchor baby in congress. This anchor baby has access to the top leaders of the US and all our security plans. In one step, he could give Cuba, who is still under the same government that wanted to kill every man, woman and child in US, the means and opportunity to kill every man, woman, and child in the US.

With all the TSA stuff in the press, I'd been thinking. Anyone sufficiently security minded should know that there's no such thing as perfect security. Maybe if all they ever did was transport dead people then you would know they wouldn't cause trouble. Even if you're not a pro, anyone could derive the law of diminishing returns from security theater.

But pre-9/11, shit happens on planes. Hijackings, bombs, whatever. They were pretty rare but they happened. But WHEN they happened, nobody pointed a finger at the president and said that he dropped the ball. Nobody cried about someone "not connecting the dots" and "intelligence failures" and all that stuff. It was just something tragic, pointless, but essentially a fluke of living in the modern world with the crazies.

But 9/11? People were chomping at the bits to blame Bush for SOMETHING, ANYTHING. And why not? A tight race that ended essentially via court order and Al Gore's withdrawing (read, not perusing additional legal action). Bush seemed to be setting the stage to frame his presidency as the The Vacationing President. Yeah, 9/11 was an act of terror with the goal of global effects, but even if it was just another random bomb the freshly brewed vitriol unlike anything I've seen before in my lifetime (Reagan and those after) would have had similar effects.

The upshot is that now random violent acts of terror now need to be defensible by politicians. It didn't happen because "shit happens," it happens because "Government Official Soandso screwed up." Protecting lives is secondary to protecting against SCANDAL. It's so politically important to make sure no random accidents or malicious acts of violence occur on their watch that politicians just can't afford to have anything happen on their watch.

As much as I hate to think this way, we really do need to have a random act of terror happen involving a plane and loss of life to show that these crazy TSA regulations are really just theater. That a dedicated individual, or group of individuals, can do what they feel they need to do and cannot be stopped just because we're afraid, and that, in the end, if it's your time, it's your time.

You seriously think that a random act of terror will make the security measures show for the security theater they are? Please. Any self-respecting politician will merely point out the security measures are just *inadequate*, and now you will have to strip prior to getting to the air line check in gate, and wait in the security line naked... or some other atrocious invasion of privacy that seems too laughable to mention now but in a short time will be "the next logical step".

I no longer fly, and it's not for fear of terrorism. The cost of flying has gotten too high, even if the financial burden has never been lower.

...is that pilots are also required to be scanned or patted-down. PILOTS. Two, three times a day, every day - from a practical standpoint. That's a lot of scanning or touching.

Of course, it's critical to ensure their identity is correct - that they are who they are suppose to be - but then screening them? Um... Even *if* they were "bad guys", they don't need weapons or explosives; they're flying the plane.

I've made this point repeatedly to my friends... I'll state it here now. The problem with America today is that we suck so badly at math.

As an example, 200 people get sick eating tomatos.... Suddenly 300 million people stop buying tomatos... All because no one can do that math in their head and figure out that they only have a 0.000000667% chance of getting sick eating tomatos.

I routinely perform this kind of math in my head, if there are more than 3 zeros after the decimal point, I generally don't have to worry about it. The sensationalist media doesn't help, but if people could do a little fact checking on their own, then we could avoid 99% of the problems caused by overreaction.

Terrorism falls into a very similar place. Everyone is OK with this insane security system because its protecting us from a "threat" unfortunately, no one is good enough at math to realize your likelihood of dying in a car accident is way way higher than being killed by a terrorist. You can probably be killed 10 times over in car accidents on the way to the airport before you will be killed by a bomb on a plane... Where are the enhanced pat downs and mandatory breathalizer tests for everyone before they operate a motor vehicle? Not to mention why don't we turn cars into faraday cages to keep people off cell phones? And we really should look at automatic governors on cars to limit their top speed to 55mph, and limit the weight/hp ratio in all cars to something that will barely allow acceleration... Well... no lets just ban cars all together, they're way too dangerous.

I'm a USAmerican and while I'll admit to sucking at math, I think it's a stretch to say I suck "so badly." I'm not exactly sure what The Problem with America Today is, but if I had to guess I'd say a lot of it has to do with extremely large organizations motivated solely by profit (AKA news media) manipulating the international discourse in ways that are profitable, which has nothing to do with a sane representation of reality. It's probably not even that satisfyingly conspiratory, unfortunately, but I do know that I've never seen anyone ram together a few legitimate data points like I have in this blog post (which I'm reproducing in entirety here to save everyone the effort of having to click through to a foreign environment):

In the style of Harper's Index, if with so much less elegance...

Number of deaths in the USA due to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists in 9/2001: 2,996
Estimated number of those that were US citizens: 2,669
Number of deaths in the USA due to traffic accidents in the same month: 3,303
Number of deaths in the USA due to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists between 9/12/2001 and 12/31/2008: 0
Number of deaths in the USA due to traffic accidents in approximately the same period: 303,841
Total approved, as of 12/2009, for the three military operations initiated to combat terrorism in response to 9/11 (excluding funds for CIA, FBI, TSA, Homeland Security, etc.): $1,086,000,000,000
Estimated budget for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the same period: $6,520,000,000
The NHTSAs budget, expressed as a percent of the amount allocated for these military operations: 00.
Estimate, in 2008, for the final total cost of the Iraq war alone: $3,000,000,000,000
Amount allocated to the military per terrorism related US citizen death in the USA since 9/11/2001: $406,893,967.78
Amount allocated to the NHTSA per traffic related death: $21,458.59
Amount allocated to the military per terrorism related US citizen death in the USA since 9/12/2001: Undefined
Percentage of causes of death in the USA that kill more people than terrorism: 100
Percentage of causes of death in the USA that receive more public money for prevention than terrorism: 0
Percent change in gross federal debt between 2001 and 2010: 232.97
Percentage of gross federal debt in 2001 that would have been eliminated by 1.086 trillion dollars: 18.8
Amount each US household would receive given 1.086 trillion dollars evenly distributed: $9443.48
Rank of defense, excluding expenditure on active military operations, among all categories of federal spending: 1
Percentage of federal spending in 2009 that went to defense: 23
Percentage of federal income in the same year that came from individual income tax: 43
Percentage that came from social security/social insurance tax: 42
Percentage that came from corporate income tax: 7

... in no time the terrorists will use children to smuggle the bombs aboard. The terrorists have absolutely no moral qualms. So what should we do?

We should not start frisking children, we should accept that once in a while a terrorist would get a bomb aboard and kill a lot of people. We should state up front, "we know it is easy to kill unarmed civilians. There is no fight, no glory in killing innocent people. But if you do kill a few of us, we can take the loss, and we will take our revenge. Living well is the best revenge, that is what we will do mostly. Also we will show how much we value our lives by the strong support and sympathy we show to every last one of us killed by you. Then we will spend as much money and effort it takes to hunt you down and bring you to justice."

Instead if we go down the path of, "we will not let you kill even one of us", their definition of success has been changed. All they have to do is to kill one American and claim victory. We should not allow them to define victory and success that way. Surest way to lose the war on terror is define success as, "not a single American could be killed by Terrorists".

It is a fact Islamic terrorists kill more muslims than non-muslims. We should repeatedly draw the contrast showing how we never say, "if we kill one terrorist it is worth 100 or 1000 American lives". But the terrorists repeatedly say, "killing one American is worth sacrificing XX or YY number of muslims".

The surest way to win the war on terror is, simply refuse to be terrorized.

Seriously, all this security theatre stuff is basically giving in to the terrorists.

The only way to win against terrorists is to *ignore* them and go about your life as before. I do like your ideas about supporting those affected. It might not be a bad idea to look at the root causes of terrorism as well.

I say offer two forms of flying, safe and unsafe. Safe, you have a separate terminal and building and go through TSA security and screening. Unsafe, there are no checks or screening. You just hop on board and hope for the best, that's what many third world countries do, so why not?

I've traveled domestically and abroad 14 times in the last 4 years, with a 1 through 4 year old, plus gear. At 1, they don't notice. At two and three, she would reliably freak out at security. My conclusions: The wait tests her patience. The packing/unpacking, undressing/dressing, unstrollering/strollering, takes away all of her comfort. Then, her mother walks away, through a big machine, towards a person with a wand.

We've learned it's best if mom goes first carrying nothing but a boarding pass, so that my daughter walks through the machine, to her mother. Then I follow, with absolutely all the gear. Often there is a meltdown, but then one parent is 100% focused on it, while the other worries about stuff, repeat scans, etc.

Now three of those twelve times, security has helped us a lot. In JFK, Hong Kong, and Beijing, they pulled us aside, and screened us in the priority/first-class lane. There's fewer people, a more enclosed space, and less overall distraction.

This post is just about kids and travel trouble; everyone else has the body-cavity-searches-sucks thread covered.

Unpleasant... yes, effective? No. I was recently made aware of someone taking a hunting knife (not a $20 swiss army, but an actual knife) through security with the help of steel-toed boots. They were stopped on their return trip and thought the jig was up only to be told they couldn't take aerosol deodorant through the checkpoint. Both checks failed to catch the knife.

In related news, another friend, working for the coast guard, routinely made it through security (as part of his job to infiltrate and notify the chief of security inside the line) with explosives, guns, etc.

As near as I can figure, the entire point of airport security is to catch idiots and pacify the masses through some sort of fear / control response.

You're right. The whole thing is security theatre at its finest. That's been true for years. Does anybody really think that an old ladies sewing needles are a threat to the airplane?

The problem now is that TSA has gone from annoyance theatre to dangerous and vile theatre. Keep it up much longer and they'll bring down the airline industry as a whole, because do you seriously think I'll ever fly to the US again while this bullshit is going on?

A lot of other countries are happy to take my tourism dollars without molesting me for the privilege.

"The problem now is that TSA has gone from annoyance theatre to dangerous and vile theatre."

I don't see why there's a problem here. This is a good thing. They've gone and done something that the everyone is actually complaining about. The airline industry is complaining about it, the general public is complaining about it, everyone except the TSA is complaining about it. The government will do something about it because now there's actually a significant opposition to it.

Previously it was 90% of people that were willing to give up their rights and submit to bullshit searches because they stupidly thought that this would protect them from terrorists, and 10% of people that complained. Obviously, this didn't help stop the TSA. Now, the numbers are reversed. The 90% of people who think that this is an invasion of privacy will hopefully be enough to stop this bullshit.

"I stood there, an American citizen, a mom traveling with a baby with special needs formula, sexually assaulted by a government official. I began shaking and felt completely violated, abused and assaulted by the TSA agent. I shook for several hours, and woke up the next day shaking."

I'm European, my last flights were last week, so after those Yemen bomb attempts. I'm glad it hasn't, at least yet, caused any extra procedures to appear here in the EU. Anyway, somehow I always set metal detectors off. Must be my shoes. Last week, same as usual - walk through the metal detector, with my shoes on, the metal detector beeps, a security guard does a quick and professional pat-down. That's pretty quick, efficient and secure enough without resorting to outright humiliating treatment.

As much as I hate to say this, in a way this story is good news. I really am sorry for the family that had to go through this. But my perception of the American public is like that of a strong, sleepy bear. Might allow someone to poke him but once poked hard enough, it awakens and becomes very dangerous. It might be true that Americans have allowed too much civil liberty erosion in the past decade (at least judging from online news) but I have confidence that what America needs is a story or two that would make national headlines. A search of a panicking 3-year-old might well be it. Or let some TSA employee be caught on camera jerking off to images from the body-scan machines. Or let someone record TSA employees discussing the dick sizes of people sent through the process. A story that can make headlines in mainstream news, not just Slashdot, and is outrageous enough might just cause the society to raise a big enough stink about it so the government is forced to back down.

If you set the metal detector off it's never a "oh, must be your shoes, you can go." It's always, take whatever you have on off, and if you set it off a 2nd time you get the full pat down.

Before the "take off your shoes" nonsense, I used to wear lightweight hiking shoes when flying. Better ankle support. So, one time I'm flying out of PDX (Portland OR) and I go through the metal detector -- BING BING!

I get wanded, and when they get to my feet, BING BING! They make me take them off and then carry them over to another Xray machine. The dope is telling me "your shoes have metal plates in them. " I know that is ridiculous. It's a lie. I say so. The dope tells me, well, sometimes they put a metal plate in the sole of one "by accident". I say that he's full of shit.

So, to prove me wrong, he takes me over to the xray machine where he says the image from my shoes is still on the screen. Except what is on the screen is obviously a full-sized, calf-high boot -- not like mine at all. Complete bullshit.

What this dope did not know, or did not admit, is that the metal wanding process at Portland Airport was being done without raising your feet off the floor, and the wand was reacting, every time, to the REBAR in the concrete flooring. EVERYONE who got wanded had metal-shanked shoes! Obviously!

Security theater at its best. Or worst.

Now we xray all boots, even metal containing ones, so all a bad guy has to do is put his knife in the sole of his boot and take it out when he gets on the plane. Oh, wait, this is clearly impossible. Never mind.

It seems to have been bought in at the same time as the new scanners came online. I think the biggest objection to it seems to be the way it's done more than anything else - the TSA officials aren't warning people about what they're doing, taking a presumption of guilt if you question any part of the process, haven't made it clear at any point what's changed (or the apparent $10,000 fine for decided you neither want to be x-rayed or felt up) and generally acting like power-drunk dicks.

What isn't clear to most people that any X-ray process, in contrast to magnetic metal detectors or THz RF scanners, *will* damage your DNA [1,2].

The medical community (and presumably the TSA) would like to convince you that X-ray doses are low enough that they are harmless. But IMO there is no "safe" dose. Just greater or lesser degrees of actual physical damage.

1. The photons of X-rays and to a lesser extent short wave UV rays have sufficient energy to break atomic bonds. Breaking the atomic bonds in water can produce hydroxyl radicals which then attack DNA which can further result in DNA double strand breaks. DNA double strand break repair is error prone [3] and corrupts the genome sequence much of the time. Thus any significant quantity of X-rays will damage ones genome and will increase ones risk of cancer and/or ones rate of aging. If the TSA is really using X-ray scanners (and people are not misinterpreting the THz scanners as X-ray scanners) then the is grounds for a lawsuit and a cease and desist decision by the courts.2. It is useful to keep this in mind when your dentist wants to take X-rays or your hospital wants to take X-rays or run a CT-scan (which involves loads of X-rays). If you can receive treatment without the need for X-rays or CT scans it is something that deserves consideration (and even prior directives to care givers/family/facilities for permanent inclusion in ones medical record). People may be subjected to X-rays or CT scans without their permission as one can observe from many TV programs involving Emergency Room treatments.3. Courtesy of the exonuclease activities in the WRN and DCLRE1C (Artemis) proteins [genes] involved in DSB repair.

The naked picture scanners that can't be saved (except when they can) and the molest^H^H^H^H^H^H pat-downs that would be criminal offenses if done outside the airport have spawned something of a populist backlash against TSA's goons.

You're seeing a lot of stories because there's both a lot of interest, and a lot of material. This is the classic example of a bureaucracy run amok and it's time for the politicians to do their jobs and regain control over it.

This is the classic example of a bureaucracy run amok and it's time for the politicians to do their jobs and regain control over it.

Bureaucracy run amok is the very definition of a politician. What we need is a government for the people by the people and we haven't had that in a couple of generations...or we have and the people are very dumb.

It's a non-story that US citizen's constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure are getting violated? It's a non-story that the government is now examining and groping genitalia without any suspicion of wrongdoing? It's a non-story that people are being threatened with lawsuits by the government for asserting their rights?

Tell me, exactly what does the US government have to do to its citizens for it to be newsworthy?

Round-up natural-born citizens and put them in concentration camps?Nope.

That happened in WW2 and nobody balked. Instead they praised democrat FDR's initiative and labeled him "best president ever". The average American simply doesn't understand the need to fight for individual rights, especially if the rights being violated are somebody else. "I am not asian, so it does not concern me." "I am not muslim, so it does not concern me." "I don't fly, so it does not concern me."

Funny how we did just fine for 40+ years of commercial air travel without it. The risk of dying in a plane crash is tiny to start with -- about 1 in 11 million -- and the risk of being the victim of a terrorist attack is smaller still. This is a) a waste of taxpayer dollars in simple terms of ROI, b) a violation of the 4th Amendment by all but the most extreme of standards, c) a clear and present example of the "slippery slope" principle in action. First metal detectors, then x-rays, then luggage searches, then shoe removal, then body scanners, then pat downs, then "enhanced" pat downs (are those anything like enhanced interrogation techniques?), and what's next? It's obscene. It's allowing ourselves to behave in a terrorized fashion. And I have no qualms about someone seeing me naked, or irrational fear of what amounts to little more than background radiation. It's not about that. It's the principle of subjecting ourselves (and our loved ones) to degrading, unnecessary, ineffective, overreaching, and (IMO) unconstitutional practices just because someone yells "Boo!" It's outrageous that people allow themselves to be cowed like this.

Look, if the "turrists" want to get us, they can. There are ample opportunities where huge amounts of people congregate that dwarf the contents of any plane (or any 4 planes for that matter), many with little or no security. Even putting aside the idea that there's no such thing as foolproof security, even if we secure those locations, they'll just pick others. Playing whack-a-mole is not the way to win -- the way to win is not to play that game.

The bit about being threatened with lawsuits was in reference to a recent case in San Diego where a passenger made the choice to leave the airport rather than consent to the search and was threatened with a lawsuit for doing so.

Yes it is. Read Amendment 9. Also 4 (which forbids congress from strip-searching or fondling Americans w/o warrant.) Plus it would be impossible for me to attend a Friday meeting in California if I had to travel by car or train (2500 miles is a frakking long distance).

Flying is the only option to get from MD to the west coast, and the government has no more right to block me from using a plane, than they do to stop me from drinking alcohol, or having sex with the same gender.

Had the Founding Fathers conceived of the day when vehicular travel was considered not a right, they would have included it in the Bill Of Rights. Indeed, one of the strong arguments against a "bill of rights" was that absence of a right from enumeration could/would be construed as non-existence thereof - hence the catch-all 9th Amendment.

The Constitution enumerates what powers the government is granted. None of those powers precludes his right to fly cross-country to a meeting, nor permit gross violations of other enumerated rights as a condition of that right, just because it is not enumerated.

WTF is up with this "flying is not a right" "driving is not a right" "the internet is not a right" stuff?

The Constitution doesn't tell us what our rights ARE, it tells us what the government CAN'T do. Just because it doesn't mention airplanes, cars, or the internet doesn't mean we shouldn't have the freedom to make up our own damn mind about what we want to do. The right to fly on a plane (if the plane is yours or agrees to carry you) is a part of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to drive on taxpayer-funded roads is part of the right to life, liberty, and happiness.

The government doesn't tell us what our rights are or aren't. The founding fathers espoused the belief that our rights are inherent to our humanity, that they transcend governmental decisions, and that they cannot be taken away without due process of law. The Constitution is also very clear about limits on what "due process of law" means - you can't be searched, and you can't have your papers (including computers, documents, or files) searched either, not without a warrant. They aren't allowed to mass-print warrants without evidence that a crime has occurred or is about to occur - *evidence*, not suspicion.

The TSA's actions are completely, utterly, and without recourse illegal under the laws described in the US Constitution. Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn't provide average citizens with any way to punish the people in power who perform these illegal acts or who mandate that these illegal acts be performed. Treason doesn't apply here, as much as I wish it did. We can't bring criminal charges against them, because a) courts won't hear cases brought by private citizens. Only a prosecutor can bring charges, and none of them will. b) any court cases involving these acts will be refused on the basis of national security, which is also illegal to do.

The problem is with our legal system, and with corrupt politicians in office, and with the mass apathy shown by the majority of the populace. I don't see any way out of this, but maybe smarter minds than mine will find something.

They may have hung themselves with their new backscatter stuff and intrusive pat-downs -- I think all this extra coverage is indicative of people outside of Slashdot-types finally realizing that TSA is out of control and helping no-one.

A while back TSA prepared to introduce high-resolution, clothes-penetrating body scanners as part of their standard procedures. There was then a flood of (accurate) stories portraying it as a "virtual strip search", which produced political pushback against the scanners and TSA made them optional, with the alternative of a pat-down search. By making the scanners an option, with a moderately intrusive but reasonably innocuous alternative, the pushback was effectively neutralized.

Recently, in an effort to get people to submit to the scanners, TSA has (and they've been fairly open that this is what they are doing) changed the pat-down procedure to make it more embarrassing with the hope that this will get more people to submit to the imaging scanners instead.

The recent flood of stories is the pushback that that change has produced.

This is a common negotiating tactic known as anchoring. If you want $10, you ask for $20, and then "reluctantly" accept $10. It's used mainly by children on their parents who want to a larger allowance or to stay up later.

They're banking on the idea that by opting to fly you've "consented" to search before boarding the aircraft. Check the fine print next time you buy a ticket. It's bullshit, but they're claiming you've consented.

Sorry, but it's the whole process that's flawed. Terrorists get by TSA all the time. Weapons get by TSA all the time. Sometimes they're even there by accident (someone forgot a hunting knife in the bag). But TSA's thugs are focused on molesting people and trying to find bottles of water.

The entire system TSA uses is fatally flawed at the core, and has to be rebuilt entirely. What we have now is very expensive theatre (and sexual assault), not actual security.